More and more people in today's busy world carry more and more personal and business items with them as they move about during the day. In addition to carrying items in purses and bags, business cases are also frequently carried with computers as well as files and other items, with the purses and cases getting heavier and heavier as more items are carried. As a result, more and more of these carrying bags and cases now include shoulder straps to help the carrier support that weight. While such straps certainly help, unfortunately the downward slope of the carrier's shoulder along with the jarring which occurs while walking tends to cause the strap to slip off their shoulder. To prevent this, people are often required to use one hand to keep the strap on their shoulder, either by constantly holding the strap or by frequently reaching up with a hand to readjust the strap. This is not only irritating for the carrier, but also prevents the person from using that hand for other tasks.
In order to help support shoulder straps, a variety of structures have been suggested, including low-slip pads (U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,879,768 and 4,887,318) as well as pinned-on supports (U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,027,527, 4,386,723 and 5,411,188).
Unfortunately, whatever the design, pads still will slip off a shoulder.
The pinned-on supports tend to be difficult to put on and can be uncomfortable to use (due to small projecting components stabbing down into the user's shoulder from the weight of the carried bag). Moreover, those supports can wobble around those projecting components. That wobble not only gives a sense of instability but also creates a grinding feeling increasing the discomfort, and that movement can also potentially damage the material it is pinned onto.
The shoulder strap and jewelry retainer of U.S. Pat. No. 5,411,188 appears to have attempted to decrease the wobble by adding pin connections. That is, it uses a pair of safety pins pivotally secured to its bottom, with each safety pin pivotable around its longitudinally extending base leg. Unfortunately, while this structure may decrease wobble somewhat, it is also difficult to attach since the pins pivot independently around different axes, with manipulation of the pins always potentially hindered by the nearby retainer portion. Further, this structure also still has potentially uncomfortable projecting components. Moreover, since the pins are independent of each other, the pointed legs of the pins may be variously spaced apart from each other when inserted into a garment and then pivoted next to each other when the pins lie flat during use, further increasing the difficulty of properly locating both pins relative to each other when attaching the retainer to a garment. As a result, the pointed legs will commonly be stuck through fabric at inconsistently spaced apart positions, and even when consistently located, when the pins are closed and pivoted flat the fabric is either bunched up uncomfortably underneath the retainer portion or the fabric is stressed and possibly torn due to the different spacing of the pointed legs than the spacing when the pointed legs are stuck through the garment fabric.
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.